Gropius may have agreed: He ensured that the Bauhaus trademark would survive the Weimar Republic by brokering a New Bauhaus in Chicago, run by one of his ex-Bauhaus colleagues, and by promoting the defunct original while head of the Harvard architecture department.

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But while the city that embraced the rule-breaking Bauhaus movement may have found a new role as the unofficial art capital of Europe, it's nothing like Paris or New York: No one teeters around its cobblestone streets in high heels, no one asks what anyone else does for a living or how much they make doing it.

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What came to be known as the "Bauhaus diaspora" can readily be seen in New York City, where Mies designed the Seagram building and Breuer the Whitney Museum.

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Moreover, for all the rhetoric of functionalism, even in their own time the most notable 1920s and '30s Bauhaus buildings and objects were really aesthetic explorations of new materials and techniques, or conceptual critiques of life in an industrial age--rather than technological inventions or discoveries in the scientific sense.

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